


will you redeem my life again

by bipolyjack



Series: Blood Runs Cold [1]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, M/M, garrus and sidonis are bitter exes you cant change my mind, garrus has feelings for mshep u cant change my mind abt that either, sidarian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 13:37:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17426903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bipolyjack/pseuds/bipolyjack
Summary: You know what they say about calling your ex.





	will you redeem my life again

For not the first time in recent months, Garrus was tempted to put a fist through the computer terminal because of the message he’d just read.

As it was, he paced quickly and furiously from one end of the battery to the other, seething. First, Shepard had prevented him from killing the bastard, and now he had the gall to forward this – this – confession? Apology? Self-justification? Whatever the hell it was, it was stirring up all kinds of emotions Garrus thought he’d buried on this particular subject.

He knew making calls while upset was generally considered bad practice, but he didn’t even try to talk himself out of striding back to the console and voice-calling the number listed at the bottom of the email.

“Garrus?”

“How… dare you,” he ground out, losing the entire angry speech he’d prepared at the first sound of that voice. He knew his subvocals were a mess, too – after spending so much time on this damn Cerberus ship, he’d just stopped paying attention to them.

“Shepard passed on my message?”

Garrus took a few deep breaths, but his voice came out just as agitated as the first time. “What the hell possessed you to contact me? What did you think I could possibly have to say to you?”

A long, heavy pause on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry.”

Damn him, his subvocals were completely under control. Garrus couldn’t get any sort of read on the sincerity of that apology. He had looked slumped and exhausted through the scope of Garrus’s rifle, and as he spoke to Shepard (and Garrus, through Shepard’s comm), Garrus thought that voice might have held a tremor. “I don’t want you _sorry_ , Lantar, I want you _dead_.” His voice was shaking so badly, even a human could have heard it. “Shepard helped me get close enough to kill you. And then he –“ he was almost trembling with fury, “- he blocked my shot. I wanted to kill you so badly, and he – he just kept saying that killing you wouldn’t – wouldn’t…”

“Bring our friends back,” Sidonis said quietly.

Garrus’s mandibles flared. “ _Our_ friends?!” _He said you were already dead._

“They were my friends too, dammit!” That was the first sign of emotion Garrus had heard from him. “I didn’t want them to die – didn’t you read my email?”

About fourteen times, but he wouldn’t be telling Sidonis that. “Oh, don’t pull that crap with me. ‘The Suns got to me, I had no choice’ – you did have a choice, you _always_ have a choice, and you chose the coward’s way out. You chose to let ten good people die instead of –”

“Letting them kill me, yes, Garrus, I am a coward, and a terrible – friend, and a weak-ass turian who can’t withstand torture, you’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know, I just –”

“Betrayed us!” _Me. Betrayed me. Used me._ And yet, here they still were, finishing each other’s sentences.

“Yes, I – I know! All right, I know! I just had to tell you, the choice I made – it wasn’t easy, all right?”

But it had been easy. _Meet me at these coordinates and we’ll get a jump on the Blood Pack,_ the message had said, and Garrus had trotted blithely off without a second thought. Sidonis said he’d be there, and Garrus wanted to be where Sidonis was. There had been no telling hitch or tremor in that voice, not then, not any of the other times he’d asked Garrus to meet him somewhere or spoken with him in front of the rest of the team. Sidonis had excellent vocal control. Even during sex he was largely silent excepting the occasional grunt or exhale. But he never spoke then, and Garrus assumed it was because he was just too reserved to show emotion, even to his – well, _lover_ was the wrong word, it wasn’t love that drove them to find each other in the deep of the night cycle while the rest of the team slept, that drove them to fuck quickly and roughly and silently, biting down on each other’s shoulders to muffle any sound they might have made. It wasn’t love. Loneliness, maybe. Bitter anger at how certain things in both their lives had turned out.

Garrus knew that, perfectly well. But the betrayal still hurt, almost as much as losing the rest of his team, almost as much as listening to Shepard gasping and suffocating over his helmet comm more than two years ago.

“Choosing your own pathetic life over the lives of ten good men, that wasn’t _easy_ for you?” Garrus was quietly, savagely pleased at how flat he’d managed to keep that statement.

A short, angry exhale. “Your life, Garrus, that’s what I chose! Your life, in exchange for all of theirs, I – I had to make sure you would be gone when they hit the safehouse, I couldn’t – I couldn’t lose all of you, I had to draw you away -”

“What?”

The words poured out as if he’d been biting them back for a long time. “They beat the coordinates out of me and made me swear not to warn any of you. I knew they’d come after me if the whole team escaped, but I had to – I couldn’t –”

“You could have warned all of us.” Garrus wasn’t quite sure how to process this new twist, and there was less venom in his response than he would have liked there to be.

“They thought you were dead,” he said softly, miserably, “and they left me alone. I was long gone by the time you started causing trouble for them again. I wanted to find you, to explain why I – what I’d – but I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“You’re right. I wouldn’t have.” _And I don’t._

“Why didn’t you kill me?” Sidonis laughed, short and hollow. “Best damn sniper I’ve ever worked with. I know you could have made the shot. After Shepard told me to leave, you must have had a clear sightline. I was waiting, I knew you were up there... It would have been an easy shot. Why didn’t you take it?”

_I heard you. I heard you tell him you were already dead. The only other time I heard you sound like that was when you told me what happened to your wife, when the Blood Pack found out you were crossing them. That was early on, right after I met you. After I saved you from the Blood Pack. Pulled you away from a six-on-one fight, blood-slick and grinning and ready to throw your life away on a back-alley scuffle. You sounded dead then, too._

“I’m not going to forgive you,” he said finally, after a long silence on both ends of the line. “I – can’t.”

“Then why didn’t you kill me, Garrus?”

He cut the transmission without giving an answer. Slid down to the floor with his back resting against the console. Closed his eyes.

It had been so easy. So easy to fall into a routine with Sidonis by his side. So easy to let his guard down when Sidonis dug his talons into Garrus’s hips like he was clinging desperately to reality, like Garrus alone was anchoring him to this world. He’d liked the tacit nature of his relationship with Sidonis, initially. They didn’t talk about things. They didn’t have to. It was nice, after ignoring calls from Tali and Liara for so long, to be free of the expectation that he wanted to talk. He didn’t. About any of it. But, dangerously, with Sidonis, he’d felt understood. It had also been easy to assume, when Sidonis would get up and return to his own quarters after, leaving Garrus alone, that they had taken all they could from each other. That they’d taken the deeper hurts, the loneliness, the bitterness, everything that was too intimate to share with words, and fucked it right out of each other, one night at a time.

And now Garrus saw how easy he’d been to manipulate. To think Sidonis had ever fixed any of the things about him that were broken – ha. Sidonis had led him around by his dick. And it sickened him that he was only just now seeing it.

Maybe if he’d been paying attention, he’d have noticed when Sidonis was gone longer than usual. He could have looked for him, rescued him from the Suns. He wondered if Sidonis had screamed while they tortured him. He’d never heard him scream, not from pain or pleasure. He couldn’t even conjure up the sound in his mind. Maybe even if he’d found him in time, he would have let it happen, out of sight in an adjoining room, listening to him scream and imagining how good the sex would have to be to make him scream like that.

Disgusted with himself, Garrus got up and strode out of the battery, heading for the elevator. He punched in Engineering. Hopefully Tali would be there, and not too busy to talk.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to be in my Sidarian feelings until the day I die. Fic and series title from M4 Part II by Faunts (from the Mass Effect 1 soundtrack).


End file.
